2006 - 2007 Featured Writers

Note: All lectures are at 7:30 p.m. and in the Wege Ballroom.
All lunch talks are at 12:30 p.m. Location and Dates to be announced.

Kurstin Lamkin - Sept. 21, 2006

Works by Kurtis Lamkin:
"Queen of Carolina" CD;
"El Shabazz" CD

Kurtis Lamkin is a poet from Philadelphia who
plays the Kora, a beautiful twenty-one string
West African harp/lute. He has performed his poems
internationally, most recently at the Gullah Festival
in South Carolina, The Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry
Festival in Waterloo, New Jersey, the Guggenheim
Museum in New York City, the New Jersey Performing
Arts Center, Lewis & Clark College in Portland,
Oregon, and at the Skagit River Poetry Festival
and Bumbershoot Festival in Washington State.

The
son of exiled Chinese parents, Li-Young Lee was
born in Djakarta, Indonesia, in 1957, and spent
his early years wandering with his family through
Southeast Asia to avoid political persecution. Lee's
mother was a member of the Chinese royal family.
His father at one time had been personal physician
to Mao Zedong but left for Indonesia where he became
a professor of English and Philosophy at Gamaliel
University, which he helped found. Arrested by then-dictator
Sukarno in a wave of anti- Chinese upset, the father
and his family managed to escape and spent five
years moving from Hong Kong to Macau and Japan before
finally emigrating to the United States in 1964.
Not surprisingly, given his personal history, his
poetry deals with questions of identity, what it
means to be Chinese, and broader questions of life
in a world where the old idea of the nation state
seems to be breaking down. Critics have compared
his work to famous poets of the past such as John
Keats, Rainier Maria Rilke and Theodore Roethke.
Lee has taught creative writing at the Iowa Writer's
Workshop, Northwestern University, the University
of Oregon, and the University of Texas, Austin.
He is also the recipient of many poetry awards,
including a creative artist grant from the National
Endowment for the Arts. He was also featured on
the PBS series The Power of the Word with Bill Moyers.

Linda Pastan -
March 20, 2007

Works by Linda Pastan:
The Last Uncle (2002);
Carnival Evening: New and Selected Poems, 1968-1998;
Heroes in Disguise: Poems (1991);
Death of a Parent (1985)

Linda Pastan, poet
laureate of Maryland from 1991 through 1994, has
received fellowships from the National Endowment
for the Arts and from the Maryland Arts Council.
She has won the Dylan Thomas Award, the Di Castagnola
Award, The Bess Hokin Prize of Poetry magazine,
the Virginia Faulkner Award from Prairie Schooner,
and a Pushcart Prize. "A Fraction of Darkness" won the Maurice English Award; "PM/AM: New
and Selected Poems" was a nominee for the
National Book Award; and " The Imperfect Paradise" was nominated for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.
Pastan lives in Potomac, Maryland. (Source: Poems.com)

The inaugural reader in
the series was Marilyn Nelson, author of six books of poetry,
including her first "For the Body" (1978), "Mama's
Promises" (1985) and "The Homeplace" (1990).
Working with domestic settings, memories of her own childhood
and her family's history, Nelson writes poems which range in
style from traditional to free verse. Her early poetry gained
her critical notice as "one of the major voices of a younger
generation of black poets." "The Homeplace" has
been praised for the range of voices in which the poet tells
her stories. Nelson has co-written books and poems for children,
including "The Cat Walked Through the Casserole" (with
Pamela Espeland, 1984) and has translated poetry from Danish
and German. She has been awarded National Endowment for the
Arts fellowships and in 1991 was a finalist in poetry for the
National Book Award. She is currently a professor of English
at the University of Connecticut.